Identity in the archaeological
literature is often treated either as irrelevant (where the true
purpose of archaeology is regarded as being to recover and understand
long-term processes) or unrecoverable, as the top level of Hawkesí ladder
of inference (1954). Both these attitudes are misplaced. Firstly
they thrust modern conceptions of identity back into the past, and
thereby legitimate modern inequalities, such as those between men and
women for example. Secondly both are based on a view that sees the
archaeological material as a record. This point of view has been
problematised above. Identity is certainly not irrelevant, it is
central to any understanding of the past, and it is certainly not
unrecoverable. Just as Barrett has argued with reference to agency, I
would argue that the archaeological material is already infused with
identity, with gender, because it was produced in, and helped produce a
world in which identity and gender were central. Those that argue that
identity is unrecoverable, if I may twist the Barrett quote, are
disarmed simply because the study of identity does not adhere for its
validation to such a theory of representation (cf. Barrett 2000b, 63).
The material conditions in which people lived, that which
archaeologists recover, are the material conditions through which
concepts of identity were created, performed, sustained and undermined.
These conceptions were central to past peopleís lives and thus must be
central to our investigations of the past.

Today identity is conceived as
being the combination of multiple factors, age, gender, sexuality,
status and personhood. Each of these made up of categories, which can
be taken up by the subject in day-to-day life. Young or old, male or
female, straight or gay etc. these are the choices available to us, in
our society, these are the positions that make us who we are. Often
these notions are perceived and presented as unchanging, eternal, and
universal. This assumes an essentialist position with regard to human
nature; we are all the same across space and time. It is the same
supra-historical position that Barrett (1994) and Giddens (1984) offer
on agency. Yet Judith Butler has clearly demonstrated how all the above
categories are in actuality merely regulatory ideals (1993, 1). We
shall return to regulatory ideals later, but first we need to begin to
think more creatively about how identity is created so that
unwarranted, essentialist positions will not be inserted onto the past
insidiously and thus legitimate modern inequalities.

Michel Foucault

One author who has thought more
stringently than others about the nature of identity is the French
philosopher Michel Foucault (1977; 1987; 1988). Foucault argues that
the conception of agency prevalent in the social sciences "places its
own point at the origin of all historicity Ė which in short leads to a
transcendental consciousness" (1970, xiv). Instead what was required,
he argued, was "not a theory of the knowing subject but rather a theory
of discursive practice" (1970, xiv). It is here that identity becomes
important, in the attempt by Foucault, as Stuart Hall has argued, to
"rearticulate the relationship between subject and discursive
practices" (Hall 2000, 16). In other words, identity emerges in an
examination of how discursive practices can create differing notions of
the subject and subjectivity. This begins to form the basis for an
argument that rejects an essentialist view of human identity. Foucault
views the subject as constituted entirely within the discursive
practices of disciplinary regimes and the repeated performances of
"technologies of the self" (Redman 2000, 10). This point is essential.
If subjects, and therefore identities, are created through discourse,
then they must be produced through historically constituted acts of
performance; through conditions, and at moments, that are unique (Hall
2000, 17). This makes identity a historically constituted creation and
different across both time and space. This conception of identity is
thus far from an essentialist one that sees it as trans-historical
human nature. Instead identity is now a process, always under
construction, a strategic and positional concept (Hall 2000, 17).
Foucaultís ideas around identity, gender and sexuality are intimately
caught up in knowledge and power. He himself points out that sexuality
for example is a

"historical construct Ö a great
surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification
of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special
knowledges, the strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked
to one another, in accordance with a few major strategies of knowledge
and power" (Foucault 1978, 105-6).

Foucaultís work has been
criticised on a number of levels. In much of his work there is little
resistance offered by the subjects (Hall 2000, 25). The power through
which disciplinary regimes construct the subject becomes unchallenged
and unchanging, the subjects themselves forming "docile bodies" (McNay
1994, 104). Lynn Meskell has accused archaeology of being "seduced by
Foucault" (2000, 16). She argues that his conceptions of power and
discourse strip the body of any corporeality, leaving it an empty
template onto which anything can be written. This however is recognised
in Foucaultís later work, particularly The use of pleasure
where he begins to discuss how subjects "practice on themselves and
others a hermeneutics of desire" (Foucault 1987, 5). In other words he
begins to acknowledge how power and discourse can be resisted through
the subjectís understanding of self. Furthermore, there have been
recent calls to increase the influence Foucault has in archaeology, in
order to combine narratives of power, identity and corporeality
(Hamilakis et al. 2002; cf. Meskell 2000). Further
examinations based on Foucaultís work have also turned directly to the
materiality of the body, and these have offered insights that develop
his work and also build notions of performativity that blend well with
the insights gleaned through an archaeology of practice. Judith Butler
(1990; 1993) has carried out the most notable of these works and it is
to her work that we will now turn.

Judith Butler: regulatory ideals and performativity

Judith Butler draws on an
eclectic range of sources including Foucault (1978), Derrida (1981),
Lacan (1977), and Iragary (1985) to problematise all our modern notions
around identity. Building on Foucault, Butler describes modern notions
of identity as being made up regulatory ideals (Butler 1993, 1). These
regulatory ideals, or regulatory fictions as Donna Haraway has
described them (1991, 135), provide idealised and reified norms which
people are expected to live up to. Thus categories such as male and
female, straight or gay, young or old are not biological facts, but
categories which we create and recite through performance. As Chris
Fowler has pointed out "the ways that subjects attempt to recite
subvert or reiterate fictions of identity mark them as a specific type
of person" (Fowler 2001, 148 emphasis in original).

These types of regulatory ideals
are thus created, sustained or undermined through performance, or to be
more exact performativity. Performativity as defined by Butler is not a
singular act, "for it is always the reiteration of a norm or a set of
norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the
present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a
repetition" (1993, 12). This reiteration is crucial in understanding
performativity. It is through repeated action that these norms are
created and lived up to. In relation to discourse, Butler argues that
performative acts are statements which also produce that which they
say. Her classic example is that of the midwife cry of "itís a girl"
which is not merely a reflection of a biological given but a
performative act, binding a gender onto the body (Butler 1993). In
other words it produces that which it names (Butler 1993, 7). Thus
performative acts are the one domain in which "discourse acts as power"
(Butler 1993, 225). Thus concepts of male and female, of gender are
historically and culturally unique. These regulatory ideals are indeed fictions
(Haraway 1991). The baby girl is not a girl until the midwife declares
her so, and thus curtails the possibility of other genders being
created and explored. But we cannot assume that the same categories
existed in the past. As Butler herself points out "these regulatory
schemas are not timeless structures, but historically revisable
criteria of intelligibility which produce and vanquish bodies that
matter" (1993, 14). Indeed there is much evidence anthropologically
that shows that other genders are possible, further weakening any
position which sees the categories of "man" and "woman" as universals.
Societies may have "multiple and fluid gender categories" which refuse
to be categorised along the simplistic male/female bifurcation of the
modern west (Rautman and Talalay 2000, 2). We will now turn briefly to
two anthropological examples of alternative gender categories, in order
to enhance this argument.

Multiple genders in Southern
India and America

A classic account of an
alternative to the simple male/female bifurcation of western gender
comes from Celia Busbyís (1997) and Serena Nandaís (1990) work in
Southern India, particularly their description of a third gender, the hijra.
The hijra are predominantly male, in the western view of
gender, and have usually gone through a process of ritual castration
(Busby 1997, 265). They dress and act as women, though particularly
unfeminine women, and actively engage in prostitution (Gilchrist 1999,
60). They also officiate at ceremonies, such as marriages and the birth
of male children (Gilchrist 1999, 60). The hijra also include
hermaphrodites and women who are unable to reproduce (Gilchrist 1999,
60). They are defined negatively rather than positively, thus they are
not part man and part woman, but neither male nor female
(Nanda 1990). The crucial factor in becoming hijra is the
inability to reproduce, thus impotent men often become hijra.
It is not the actuality of reproduction that defines them, because
homosexual men may never reproduce, but maintain the potentiality for
reproduction, and thus are men not hijra (Nanda 1990, 14). The hijra
thus form a third gender within Indian society, performing in their own
way, and defined through the inability to reproduce, rather than the
absence of sexual organs.

A second example can be drawn
from the literature on Native American culture. The existence of a
third gender in many Native American tribes was reported in
ethnographic literature up until the middle of the 19th
Century (Gilchrist 1999, 61). Known as "two-spirit" the individual
would take on the clothing, dress and manner of a member of the
opposite gender (Gilchrist 1999, 61). Although this was usually a man
taking on womenís clothing, in many tribes the reverse also occurred.
Due to the practices demise in the mid-19th century their
exact status is unclear but they appear to have been both revered and
stigmatised by different tribes (Gilchrist 1999, 61). Originally male
two-spirits would take up domestic tasks including basket making,
whilst female two-spirit would take on the more male dominated areas of
hunting and warfare. Although many two-spirits would engage in same-sex
relations, they were not defined by this, as others would not (Fulton
and Andersen 1992, 608). Here again, performance, dress and action were
more important in defining gender than sexuality. Like the hijra,
two-spirits also played important roles at certain ceremonies: burial
and mourning rituals, assisting wounded, dancing at the return of
warriors (Gilchrist 1999, 62). It is clear therefore that the
two-spirit also occupied a liminal zone, between man and woman, human
and god, living and dead (Gilchrist 1999, 62). These two examples have
begun to show the range of genders possible for human beings to take
up. There is no limit to the number of different gendered positions
available to societies in the past. Multiple genders may have had
important roles in the rituals of the Neolithic, just as the hijra
do in India and the two-spirit did in Native American culture.

Constructed gender,
constructed sex?

The presentation of gender above
has offered an account that takes a particular western view; that
whilst gender is constructed, sex is a biological constant. It was this
that allowed me to discuss male and female hijra, because from
this point of view their gender changed when they became hijra
but their sex remained the same. Judith Butler has now robustly
challenged this point of view, through her work on the body,
performativity, gender and difference (1990; 1993). Sex, Butler argues,
is just another regulatory ideal, like gender, that we are required to
live up to by society (Butler 1993, 1). Far from being a biological
given, "sex is an idealised construct that is forcibly materialised
through time" (Butler 1993, 1). The maintenance of a simplistic
sex=natural: gender=cultural dichotomy, is simply a continuation of the
problematic Cartesian duality between nature and culture that has
bedevilled archaeology and other social sciences for years (Ingold
2000). Thus Butler wishes to rephrase the question away from "how is
gender constituted as and through a certain interpretation of sex?" to
"through what regulatory norms is sex itself materialised? And how is
it that treating the materiality of sex as a given presupposes and
consolidates the normative conditions of its own emergence?" (Butler
1993, 10). The argument that sex is far from a simplistic, natural
bifurcation is even supported by biology itself which has shown there
are 11 different chromosomal categories of sex, with the traditional
man XY and woman XX simply the extremes on both sides (Gilchrist 1999,
57). There have also been cases of sex reversal where a person with XY
chromosomes has a female phenotype or XX have a male phenotype
(Gilchrist 1999, 57). So even from the simplistic view of the natural
sciences, sex cannot be presented as an unthinking universal
bifurcation.

Categories of sex and gender are
constructed against an outside, against non-viable choices, that secure
the boundaries of sex (Butler 1993, 8). The construction of these
categories is through exclusion, through abjection, through making some
bodies unthinkable (Butler 1993, 188). In the heterosexual hegemony of
modern western society, these abjected bodied maybe homosexual, but in
other societies, different bodies may lie outside the regimes of power
and discourse constructed through performativity.

It is important at this point to
emphasise that despite the above discussion one aspect of identity, be
it sex or gender cannot be privileged at the expense of another. All
areas of identity be it age, race, status, sexuality, sex or gender
interrelate with one another. Gender may be understood very differently
depending on the age of the subject or the sexuality. We cannot assume
either that all of these areas had an affect on the identity of people
in the past. Foucault has demonstrated the changing concern with
sexuality since classical times, for example (Foucault 1978; 1987;
1988). There may also have been alternative categories of identity that
remain hidden from us. However the need for a vocabulary in order to
discuss these issues means that despite difficulties surrounding them,
these terms will continue to serve as short hand for the various areas
of identity we wish to discuss. Despite this it is essential to
remember that each area is entirely interdependent on the next, no-one
area can be understood without reference to another (Butler 1993, 116).

There have been several critiques
of Judith Butlerís work, one of which has come from Bryan Turner
(1996). Turner takes age as a test for Butlerís theory of
performativity, reiteration and interpellation, the hailing of the
subject by particular discourses (cf. Althusser 1971). Turner
distinguishes between the social construction of ageing, which he
agrees is a variable concept, and the physical, phenomenological
experience of ageing (1996, 29). In other words on the one hand, people
in different societies may be expected to act differently in social
situations depending on their age, and differing amounts if respect may
be shown. Thus the elderly who may be treated as respected elders in
one society, might be disregarded as weak or infirm in another (Turner
1996, 30). But on the other hand, the physical process of ageing
affects everybody in similar ways, through loss of strength and
eyesight, greying hair and failing mental capacities. Thus Turner
argues we do not need to reject the phenomenological experience of life
in order to accept the social construction of different categories.

Judith Butler acknowledges the
temptation of such a critique, but at the same time refuses to bow to
it. She points out that as soon as one acknowledged the essentialism of
certain aspects of the human body, one is drawn back into a discourse
in which sex is a purely biological construct (Butler 1993, 10).
Furthermore, whilst one might accept the basic phenomenological facts
of human existence (pain, pleasure, consumption, excretion) as
irrefutable, "their irrefutability in no way implies what it might mean
to affirm them and through what discursive means" (Butler 1993, xi).
She also questions why these "biological necessities" are privileged
over that which is constructed (Butler 1993, xi). Bodies only appear,
Butler argues, within the constructions, discourses and constraints of
our understanding of the world (1993, xi).

Another critique has come from
Elizabeth Grosz, who has questioned the requirement for gender if sex
is seen as performative (1995, 212). She argues that gender is now a
redundant category, its meaning met by sex on the one hand and
sexuality on the other (1995, 213). Grosz argues that Butlerís work is
more powerful if one rejects the concept of gender altogether and
locates all of the variability of the human body, within sex (1995,
214). I disagree with this argument. I do not agree that the
performative nature of sex means that gender is now a defunct concept.
The possibilities of performativity leave open scenarios in which
gender and sex would not be the same. Although both are produced
through the citation and reiteration of regulatory ideals so are all
aspects of identity. Ultimately conflating the two reduces our
available vocabulary for delineating distinctions between different
subjects and between the different concepts they might have of
identity. Thomas Laqueur, for example, has demonstrated how in medieval
times men and women were perceived as being of the same sex, but of
different gender (1990). To be more precise, women were seen as the
literal inversion of the male (Turner 1996, 27). Our ability to
describe this point of view is diminished if we drop the distinction of
sex and gender from our vocabulary, even if it adds more power to
description of bodily instability today (cf. Grosz 1995, 212).

One final difficulty with the
work of Judith Butler is that it discusses the citation and performance
of only one form of personhood, that is only one form of
conceptualising human existence; that of the western individual. Other
forms of personhood have been shown to exist in anthropological
accounts and thus may also have existed in the past. It is to an
examination of this that we now turn.

Personhood, individual, partible or combinable?

The prevalent notion of
personhood in the west has been that of free, knowledgeable
individuals, entire unto themselves. This mode of understanding has
often been used to understand other societies, be they current
non-western societies or those of the past. This in effect has thrust
the modern western notion of personhood unwarranted into the past and
onto non-western societies. In archaeology, recent calls to renew the
search for individuals (Hodder 1999; 2000; Meskell 2000; 2001) have
been criticised from this point of view (e.g. Fowler 2000). The
individual is a particular and peculiar way of approaching the world.
Recognition of this began with the seminal work of Marilyn Strathern, The
Gender of the Gift (1988). In this work Strathern expounds an
alternative version of personhood, taken from her ethnography of
Melanesia (1988). Principally Strathern argues that people in Melanesia
are dividuals rather than individuals (M. Strathern
1988, 13). They are not bounded in the western sense, whole and intact,
they are partible, divisible and dividual. The partible nature of
people, made up of the social relations in which they reside, means
that groups become homologues of the singular and vice versa (M.
Strathern 1988, 13). However this is contrasted with a pair, which is
not equitable with either the singular or the group (M. Strathern 1988,
14). Both men and women in Melanesia are composed of male and female
parts; thus gender differences only emerge under certain conditions of
social action (Gosden 1999, 133). As Strathern puts it, "being "male"
or "female" emerges as a holistic unitary state under particular
circumstances" (1988, 14). One such circumstance is in the pair mode,
where the gender duality within each person is rejected and a singular
gender emerges (M. Strathern 1988, 15). This contrasts with the group
mode where "each male or female form may be regarded as containing
within it a suppressed composite identity; it is activated as androgyny
transformed" (M. Strathern 1988, 14). Different parts of the Melanesian
body can represent different gendered substances, they are in effect a
"mosaic of male and female substances" (Busby 1997, 270). This gender
duality can even be seen in some objects that take on male or female
associations in different contexts. The flute, for example, used in
male initiation rites in the Eastern Highlands is seen as a female
penis (Gosden 1999, 134). Another example is penile bleeding which can
be seen as menstrual (M. Strathern 1988, 126).

Exchange is crucial to this
understanding of personhood. Built up by the multiple social relations
in which they are engaged, these dividuals are separable into different
parts, some of which can be given away through gift exchange (Fowler
2001, 139). In this model of exchange objects do not act as synecdoche
for the person, they are understood as being drawn from one person and
absorbed by another (M. Strathern 1988, 178). People are enmeshed in
social relations, in the flow of substances, gifts and interaction
(Fowler 2001, 139). Gifts can be multiply authored and build a
biography that only further entwines them in the creation of social
relations. They can also be linked to narratives, counter-narratives
and morality (Maschio 1998; Hagen 1999).

Strathernís model of personhood
in Melanesia offers an alternative, relational account to the
traditional model of western personhood, but other alternative accounts
have also emerged of personhood in different parts of the world. For
example Celia Busby has described how the people in Southern India have
a combinable sense of personhood (1997). When men and women marry they
are represented by a single body (Busby 1997, 269). More than this
however, for them to be fully effective as men and as women they need
to go through this combination (Busby 1997, 269). As we have seen above
with the hijra, gender in Southern India is closely associated
with reproduction. The hijra are defined as neither male nor
female because of their inability to reproduce. Men and women thus in
contrast are defined as their gender through the act of reproduction,
which in turn combines their personhood into a single body (Busby
1997). Indian bodies in this context Busby argues are not partible like
Melanesian bodies but permeable (1997, 275). Busby thus points
out that although people from India have also been called dividuals,
their notion of personhood is demonstrably different from that in
Melanesia (1997, 275).

Three different models of
personhood thus emerge, the western individual and the two dividual
models from Melanesia and India. Chris Fowler has defined these as
relations that separate (Melanesia), relations that integrate (Southern
India) and relations that alienate (western individual) (2001, 140)
(fig. 1). These provide three models for personhood, which can be used
to help open up different understandings of the material conditions of
life in the past. It should be emphasised however that these models are
not mutually exclusive, nor do they present a totality of possibilities
for human personhood (Fowler 2001, 140).

All this seems to have taken us a
long way from the un-theorised agents we were left with at the end of
the last chapter; what room is there now within these concepts of
regulatory ideals and personhood for agency, habitus and practice? In
order to answer these questions we must first briefly examine the work
of Chris Fowler (2001), an archaeologist who, whilst drawing on Butler
and M. Strathern, has steered clear of social theorists like Bourdieu
and Giddens. I hope that a brief analysis of a particular study of his
will allow me to demonstrate how older concepts of habitus and agency
can still offer us important advantages in the study of the past.

Chris Fowler: citation of
personhood in the Manx Neolithic

Chris Fowler, drawing on the work
of Judith Butler and Marilyn Strathern, has recently offered an
engaging and original account of personhood in the Neolithic of the
Isle of Man (Fowler 2001). Fowler examines the human remains on the
Isle of Man and argues they represent "actions which cite aspects of
previous discourses" (2001, 149). The Neolithic on the Isle of Man saw
the mixing of human bone, animal bone and material culture (Fowler
2001, 150). At Ballharra, a chambered cairn, an inhumation was found
containing body parts from three different, male, skeletons (Fowler
2001, 155). Fowler argues that this deposition "may have been an
expression of the regulatory fiction of selfhood; that a person should
be integrated with others, because that is how to live; or it may have
been a resistance to a different regulatory fiction" (2001, 155-6).
Other monuments featured different citations, for example at
Knocksharry the deposits placed greater emphasis on separation (Fowler
2001, 157). The activities and performances at monuments on the Isle of
Man were, Fowler argues, citations of particular forms of personhood
(2001). The forms of personhood cited were very different from that of
the modern individual though, and were tied in with ideas around life,
death, separation and exchange. Overall Fowler argues that the higher
the degree of bodily separation the greater the "immersion or
absorption in the material world" (Fowler 2001, 159). In other words,
he interprets partibility in death as a sign of partibility in life and
thus in personhood. The separation of the corpse acts as a citation of
this regulatory ideal (Fowler 2001, 159).

Fowlerís account offers novel
insights into the nature of personhood in the Manx Neolithic. There are
several difficulties however. Principally, there seems little room for
subversion or resistance within his narrative. The act of splitting up
a corpse is only citation, it never acts as a creative, subversive or
dangerous act. Thus there seems little way of explaining change.
Despite the quote above, which includes reference to such resistance,
this is downplayed by Fowler, and the subjects described by his work,
although different from the knowledgeable agents of Barrett (1994)
remain internally undifferentiated. It seems that Fowlerís work, like
that of the early Foucault, offers little more than docile bodies to
fill his account. This is a problem also identified with Butlerís work
(McNay 2000), and thus it is little surprise that it finds it way into
Fowlerís analysis when he draws so heavily upon Butlerís concepts of
performativity, citation and reiteration (Butler 1993).

From this perspective Judith
Butler, along with Foucault and others drawing on poststructural
constructivism, have been criticised recently by Lois McNay, who has
argued that they approach identity, and crucially agency from a
negative paradigm (2000, 2). The negative moment of subjection she
argues is privileged (2000, 2). Although Foucault made moves towards a
more agency rich position, through his concepts of technologies of the
self, this remains unexplored in detail, and remains in McNayís opinion
an unsatisfactory account of agency (2000, 8-9). Agency, McNay
concedes, is not totally absent from these accounts, but locates itself
"mainly through the residual categories of resistance and to or
dislocation of dominant norms" (McNay 2000, 3-4). Thus although the
work of Foucault and Butler destabilises gender and identity, and
offers a new way of conceptualising sex and sexuality, they fail to
offer a generative schema for agency and practice. They therefore fail
to explain the creation and subversion of categories, norms and
fictions in either the past or the present. In order to correct this
imbalance, we need to reincorporate an archaeology of practice, with
its concomitant theories of agency and habitus (Giddens 1984; Bourdieu
1977).

Bourdieu and Butler, practice and performativity

The similarities between Bourdieu
and Butler have been noted by several authors (e.g. Gilchrist 1999, 56;
McNay 2000, 40). Both place emphasis on bodily materiality, the way one
carries oneself, on corporeality in other words. Lois McNay has argued
that the combination of the two allows each to deal with the otherís
principal weakness. For Butler, this is the way agency is underplayed
in her account through her reliance on a negative paradigm of
subjection, and for Bourdieu his failure to deal adequately with the
unstable nature of gender and the ways in which agency can emerge from
the margins (McNay 2000, 46-56). Bourdieuís account of agency is
generative rather than prescriptive. The concept of habitus offers a
way of thinking about agency that whilst creative and temporal, is also
historically and socially specific (McNay 2000). Due to her reliance on
Foucault, Butler remains trapped between competing relations of
dominance and resistance, whilst Bourdieu offers a more "nuanced view
of political agency" (McNay 2000, 56). Butlerís proposed view of
identity however resists the naturalised view of the modern west and
allows, in contrast to Bourdieu, the ambiguities and dissonance of
performative identity to emerge (McNay 2000, 54). What is needed is
thus an understanding of both practice and performativity, of performative
practice in fact.

It is insufficient merely to
combine these two authors however. We also require the work of Giddens.
This is not to reintroduce the a-historical knowledgeable agent, but to
consider how actions can have ramifications beyond the life span of a
single subject. The concept of time-space distanciation allows Giddens
to describe how institutions and groups can allow a single subjectís
actions to permeate beyond his immediate surrounds both temporally and
spatially (1984, 377). The concepts of both habitus and performativity
place too much emphasis on the subject themselves, on their learned
action, on their identity and success or failure at living up to
different regulatory norms. The agency of subjects can affect otherís
conceptions of habitus and identity. Word of mouth for example can
spread and affect those who may never have met a particular individual.
These consequences may be an unintended outcome, but this makes it no
less worth considering. In archaeology, the concepts drawn from Giddens
and Bourdieu have allowed John Barrett to offer the view of the
archaeological material that I discussed earlier (2000a, 24). That far
from being a record, the material is the physical conditions through
which life was led. This is an essential point when we begin to
consider how different archaeological deposits not only cited different
regulatory norms but also created them, and created the conditions
through which they were understood. We cannot stop here however. If we
are to understand how identity was created in the past, indeed how
people lived at all, we must consider other work I have discussed.
Conceptions of personhood drawn from Marilyn Strathern and Celia Busby
are also essential in preventing the modern western concept of the
individual becoming a presumed essentialist universal.

Thus we return to the difficulty
of essentialism. Much of what has been written about agency has been
accused of being essentialist. What I hope I have indicated here is
that, despite this, agency remains an important way of understanding
human action in the past. In order to counterbalance accusations of
essentialism we need to take on board the nuanced temporal habitus of
Bourdieu, and combine it with understandings of personhood and identity
drawn from Foucault, Butler and M. Strathern. Despite the essentialist
nature of some of his work, Anthony Giddens still has much to offer us.
It is only through the combination of multiple theoretical sources that
we can deal with each oneís weakness. Too often in archaeology,
simplistic polemics are offered declaring the superiority of this
philosopher or that social theorist. Instead we require more complex,
less mono-causal explanations for why archaeology has failed to deal
adequately with the complexity of identity and agency in the past. This
may make for less elegant narratives, but that I believe is a small
price to pay.

Even the sources outlined above
only touch on the range of considerations required. Memory and emotion
are also important, as recent archaeological and anthropological
sources have shown (Bradley 2002; Riviere 2000; Whittle 2003). Equally
so may be concepts of shared values, often underplayed in prehistoric
archaeology (Whittle 2001). We also need to consider the nature of
human beings interactions and understanding of their environment, of
their relations with plants and animals (Ingold 2000; Fairbairn 1999).
The nature of thought also needs to be considered. The work of Maurice
Bloch has shown how human thought is not linear and narrative in nature
(the so called folk theory of thought) but linked through nodes of
thought in complex ways (1992; 1998). Thus a consideration of what, in
a society "goes without saying" is also essential (Bloch 1992). We need
to consider a multiplicity of agencies at a multiplicity of scales, a
plurality of genders associated with complex unstable identities. We
need to think about how certain practices became unthinking, part of
the habitus, but also how these may have been challenged subverted and
overthrown. We need to offer temporal and contingent notions of agency,
identity and performativity. These notions must be historically
specific so accusations of ontological essentialism can be avoided.

The above is offered as some kind of summary for
the arguments laid out in detail over the last two chapters. In what
follows I shall attempt to take this abstract position and show how it
can be applied to the data through an analysis of the creation of
identity at the Neolithic causewayed enclosures of Windmill Hill and
Etton. But first we must take a moment to paint the background to the
creation of these sites by discussing Earlier Neolithic of Southern
Britain.